Gearing up to cheer on Tavish Scott in tonight's leaders' debate #spdebate #greatscott

Only an hour and 13 minutes until the election campaign really kicks off with the first of three leaders' debates.

I bet the four leaders are all in various states of nervous meltdown. It really can't be a pleasant experience, especially when you remember what a game changer they were during the Westminster elections last year. I don't envy any of them. They will have spent many hours preparing for this, with colleagues playing the other leaders. I'd love to know who played Tavish in each of the other parties.

Obviously I'll be there with laptop ready to cheer on Tavish Scott. Some of us were having a wee chat on Twitter this afternoon about what our cheerleading hashtag should be - we had #gonick and later #iagreewithnick last year. I reckoned #greatscott might work and some others seemed to like it, so we'll give it a try.

I really, really hope that Tavish and Annabel get enough time in there to stop it becoming a screaming match between Gray and Salmond. Their FMQs sessions each week are frustrating and uninspiring.

All the leaders need to remember that the issues they are talking about tonight affect real people's lives. To me a good debate will be real and practical and illuminating. A bad one will have a lot of rudeness and shouting and general arsy behaviour. They all need to step up and give us a quality, serious debate that has substance and passion.  Am I asking too much.

Anyway, off to open a nice bottle of red. I think a glass is in order..................

The Leaders' Debates, Patrick Harvie and a missed opportunity

A couple of weeks ago, Jeff over at Better Nation started off a petition to get Patrick Harvie of the Green Party included in the leaders' debates in the run up to the Holyrood elections, building on a post written the day before by James, who works for Patrick. This campaign has garnered quite a lot of support since from people like Lallands Peat Worrier and The Burd.

Much as I can see their point, to be honest, I've been a bit rhett butlerish about the whole thing so I thought it was maybe time to explain why, frankly, I'm finding it hard to give a damn.

Patrick Harvie appears in my list of Top Ten MSPs, so it's not that I have any aversion to him, it's just that I think the Greens here had a really good opportunity to put into practice the sort of pluralist approach that they are supposed to champion.

Let me explain. Patrick Harvie is not the leader of the Green Party in Scotland. He is the Co-Convener, an office he shares with Eleanor Scott, who was between 2003 and 2007 a Green MSP for the Highlands and Islands. I actually think that rather than push for Patrick, I'd have been a lot more engaged with the idea if they'd decided against putting another middle aged bloke in a suit on that stage, where, frankly, there are already enough of them, and gone for a woman who has equal authority and status in their party.

Not only that, but having Eleanor on would have shown a bit of confidence on their part that their ambitions weren't just limited to Glasgow and Edinburgh this time, that they hoped to represent the whole of Scotland.

I know that the Greens will come back and say that Patrick's their leader in the Parliament - but why not get out there beyond the Parliament?

I guess I'm just a bit disappointed that the Greens haven't been a bit more imaginative about how they've played this. It just screams of blokes in a huddle again, not looking at the bigger picture. They want Patrick in the debates to give them more balance, but they've missed the chance to show that they are aware of and act on other sorts of imbalance. They have missed the opportunity to really challenge the conventional way of doing things and that's why the campaign for Patrick just hasn't grabbed me.